


The Vigil

by filledor



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, Future Fic, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-06 20:58:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filledor/pseuds/filledor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She tried to ignore it, the chill on the other side of the bed. The dust on his pocket-watch, sitting right where he'd left it. The bookshelf he had promised to assemble when they got married. The never-worn wedding dress in a closet halfway down the hall. But, as she has learned in this year of pain, life goes on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vigil

**Author's Note:**

> My first fanfiction work to be published, somewhat inspired to be a spear counterpart to badva's "gone" (which is really good). Rather depressing. I've never experienced a loss of this magnitude, and I think that the ending is a bit cliche, but the story was kind of depressing me. As a model, I used my experiences of loss as well as feelings regarding recent family illnesses. There is perhaps an overabundance of the phrase "Life goes on".

Every morning, she woke and tried not to feel how cold the other side of the bed was. Every morning, she pretended that the little silver pocket watch wasn’t getting dustier and dustier on the bureau, right where he left it. In a halfhearted attempt to put his things away, she had done his laundry; it was neatly folded in a basket nearby. Not as neatly as he might have liked, but given the circumstances, it would have to do. The bookshelf he had promised to finish when they got married was in a hall closet, leaned against her wedding dress. Charlotte had offered to take both but it didn’t seem right Sometimes, Lizzie wondered if the dress would still fit. Her final fitting had been the day she got the news. She could still feel the way the clothes hanger bit into her hand, still hear the soft rumple of the garment bag hitting the San Francisco sidewalk, still feel the lightness of her arm as her life tore and bit and crumpled around her.

He was still in her contacts. They hadn’t recovered his cell phone after the accident. The last time they talked, he mentioned he saved all the voicemails she left him, even the first one, when she had asked him to chat. She’s laughed and said he didn’t have to save her voice with so many conversations yet to come. Lizzie had long ago accepted that her life seemed to be embodied by the heavy-handed irony of those awful Lifetime movies Lydia had made her watch to “cope”.  
They tried to help, Lizzie knew they did. Gigi and Fitz dealt with the out-of-town guests and gave her free dinner for longer than she deserved. Deep down, she knew that she should be taking care of them, that they had known him longer than she had, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do anything. Did that make her selfish? She didn’t have the energy to care.

Charlotte helped clean out the apartment. Well, really, Charlotte cleaned out the apartment while Lizzie sat on the couch folding the same shirt over and over. She’d stayed for a week, willing to sit in silence and eat Lizzie’s share of the inevitable frozen pasta dinner some acquaintance sent with their sincerest condolences. Lydia came a few days later, and Jane and Bing, all the way from New York. Jane had argued with the airline on the phone for an hour to switch the tickets; they were supposed to be arriving next week, just in time for the rehearsal dinner. In a way, it was better, having all these people around, forcing her to eat and sleep. But no matter how sincere they were, no matter how good their advice, their fiancés hadn’t just died an ocean away. They didn’t know how it felt.  
God, it had made her feel seventeen again, to think like that. But it was true. None of them understood why she wouldn't let them touch his tie closet, or why she had slapped Charlotte’s hand away when she tried to move the pocket watch. He carried that thing everywhere; it was just lucky he had finally forgotten something. She didn't understand it, either, why she was like this. All she knew was that her smile felt like rusty machinery and chocolate didn't taste the way it used to, even semi-dark and sea-salt caramel.  
Her wedding day came and passed with cold lasagna and awkward silence, and slowly her family began to leave. Jane went home first, after Lizzie nearly shoved her onto the plane. Bing followed, the shock still lingering in his eys. Her parents showed up that evening and picked up Lydia, her father’s tie black and her mother quiet for a change. Charlotte’s visits became less and less frequent as duties dragged her back to Hunsford. On the last day of her honeymoon, she realized that she had forgotten to cancel the hotel. The maids there were probably happy that there was one less room to clean. Maybe they thought that Mr. and Mrs. William Darcy were ghosts. In a way, Lizzie thought, they were.

William F. Darcy was buried next to his father the next morning in a closed-casket funeral, his body having only just come in from Hamburg. The following meal was quiet, mainly populated by business associated of himself and of his father. The family of the deceased sat together, trying to hold back tears and to ignore the sickly dog walking on the table and eating their plates. After the party wrapped up, two napkins were discarded, irreparably stained with inky mascara. The waitstaff joked that they should know better, considering the same family had hosted another funeral luncheon just a few years before.

That night, a security guard at the cemetery saw a dark-haired girl leaning against one of the newer tombstones. He let her.

But life went on. It was a busy time for L. Bennet Productions. She had thirty people working under her now, not to mention the independent content creators she worked with. Her first day back was fine, nothing special, just meetings and calls and more meetings she could pretend to smile through, until her phone beeped and the words were on the screen: Project Doceo meeting with Pemberly Digital. It was Pemberely’s new education initiative, very hush-hush. After some “business espionage”, she decided she wanted in. The meeting was supposed to be fun, quick, an excuse to go out to lunch right afterwards and actually discuss it. She knew where they were going to go, too; the little café down the street with overpriced sandwiches but almost nobody else there.

This wasn’t fair. Why did it happen to her, to Fitz, to Gigi, to anybody? She felt like screaming. And so, upon remembering that she was her own damn boss and she could do anything she damn well pleased, she went to her car, locked the doors, and started crying. Once she had mostly stopped, she got out and started walking. It took a while to realize she wasn’t headed back to her office. Good. She needed a walk.

Lizzie walked up and down the unforgiving hills of San Francisco, the city of her future. When she had moved here, it had been a markedly different future, a future with a job and a boyfriend and the not-so-terrible notion that 2.5 kids and a white picket fence weren’t too far away. Now, all she was left with was a startup company she had to run and a big empty apartment filled with bowties she couldn’t bear to throw away.

She visited the grave on Saturdays, every Saturday, without fail. The times varied, but no matter what, she never went mornings, because funerals were mornings and she didn’t like the crowds. When she went, she sat on the ground in whatever she wore and was silent. She could sit there for hours, just sitting, not even sure what was going through her head. The first visits, she cried, but, then, strangely enough, she stopped. It was at the fresh-cut grave of William Darcy that Lizzie finally found something a bit like peace.  
Even months after the funeral and the lunch and the mascara-stained napkins, Lizzie found food on her doorstep three times a week. Even throwing most of it in the trash, she realized she would never finish it alone. And so Gigi and Fitz were invited to dine on leftovers of lasagna and shepherd’s pie, and when they came it was silent at first, but then as the night wore on and was toasted again and again, they started to laugh. Not for the first time, but in a way that made them all hope for a second it wouldn’t be the last. And they started to say his name, the three friends sitting at the two-seat island because the dining-room table was set for four, and telling tales of William Darcy, force of nature, and in that moment, he was not the only one whose spirit lived more than it had in a while.

The night ended, and so normal life prevailed. But they came back and back and back again, and soon Lizzie Bennet found Wednesday night dinners a permanent fixture of her schedule, halfway between one Saturday vigil and the next. She felt light again, not the dizzy unbalance of a garment bag dropped onto a California sidewalk, but that feeling of mastering her fate, not the other way around. She planned a business trip to Vidcon.

It was not as if she did not wake every day to the chill of the other side of the bed, that she packed up William’s things, that the bookshelf and wedding dress still hid all too well-remembered in a closet across the hall. It was not as though she did not keep her Saturday vigils, or that Wednesday Night Dinners moved into the dining room set for four. It was not as though she did not miss William F. Darcy every time her heart beat. It was not as though a few moments could erase what happened, any of it, that she could simply pick up and continue as if nothing happened. But if she knew anything at all, she knew that life was to go on, and Elizabeth Bennet knew she could take that challenge lying down.


End file.
